Re: Call for contributors

[Quentin Mathé]

Hi,

It is a very late reply, but is probably better than no reply… ;-)

Le 23 déc. 04, à 10:07, NA a écrit :

> There is a new, award winning, open source, volume visualization 
> project which is currently in version 1.5 on PowerPC.
> http://homepage.mac.com/rossetantoine/osirix/Index2.html
> This is currently a Macintosh only application.

Looks nice.

> There is extreme interest in porting this application to Linux. There 
> is no open source Windows or Linux application of any caliber, 
> anywhere near OsiriX. The speed and excellence of the development owes 
> to using the rapid application development tools that are at the core 
> of both Mac OS X and GnuStep. We believe that the GnuStep community is 
> well aware of this. We would like the rest of the world to know. 
> Interested developers are presenting with notable credentials from 
> institutions across the globe.
>
> It quickly became apparent that GnuStep should allow a far simpler 
> Mac2Linux port, than any other environment. Does that seem to be the 
> concensus?

Probably true.

> We are interested in discovering any interest on the part of GnuStep 
> users and developers in participating in this project.

I'm interested but I must said I have no more time to be involved in 
other projects…  but I will gladly help you if you need explanations on 
GNUstep or you discover bugs in GNUstep.
… otherwise I think if you can remunerate the developers for this port, 
there will be probably some GNUstep developers interested (me included 
may be later in the year… :-).

> It is currently anticipated that a Power5/PowerPC initial version will 
> be the simplest to port, as most of the system calls to Altivec, of 
> which there are many, should work transparently. Any insight here 
> would be helpful.

True, but you must take in account that we have no really working gdb 
versions for GNUstep on PowerPC currently… (Apple gdb doesn't work, and 
FSF gdb is broken, even if I have find a workaround for the most 
annoying bug in the last one)…

> Any information and assistance on any of these matters would be 
> greatly appreciated. Suggestions to ease the porting, such as the 
> applicability of Renaissance in this situation, would be of help. Any 
> source of information that anyone can suggest that would serve as a 
> road map in the process would be invaluable.

For porting information, you can read http://www.gnustep.org 
documentation… but it is not what I would call exhaustive.
One of the advantage of Renaissance currently is you can have a single 
file for the UI code on both Mac OS X and GNUstep, unlike with Gorm 
which doesn't read or write Mac OS X nib… but this last point should 
probably change this year, because it is planned to add to Gorm the 
possibility to read and write Mac OS X nib.

> I have several questions to pose to this list, but I would like to be 
> sure that this is the best forum to do so.
> Are there other message boards; which anyone feels are as, or more, 
> appropriate?

Yes, you can post them here, I will reply to them if I'm knowledgeable 
on the subject. (I will reply faster in the future, yes… ;-)

Quentin.

--
Quentin Mathé
qmathe@club-internet.fr